4 zwave dongles down, finally one works!

Hardware
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I find it strange how amazingly bad my zwave experience has been thus far. I bought no less than 4 zwave dongles before hitting upon one which would pair with anything at all. First was an unbranded silicon labs device, admittedly a very new 800 version, so fair enough wasn’t recognised, thought I would try the latest and greatest version of the protocol and it wasn’t very expensive, although a lot more than any zigbee dongle.

Then I got a slightly older, Silicon labs UZB-7 , at least this one was recognised, but again never paired with anything.

Next up was the Zooz 800, again, never paired with anything.

Finally the winner, an Aeotec z-stick 7, at last, something that actually paired with some devices, some, but not all. Still had trouble with humidity sensor which apparently is in the zwavejs database, but never really works.

The only things that worked fairly well were some plug sockets, hardly a specialised use case, being powered up all the time, and typically pretty close to the hub.

This stuff seems to be really expensive and massively time wasting, delivering almost nothing. Just don’t understand how come everyone else seems to love it over zigbee. I’ve found zigbee to be quite flaky too though. 5m hops seems about the best I can manage here.

I’ve started to get superstitious now thinking maybe I live in a particularly radio noisy place or something.

Sorry for the negative post. Overall discovering home assistant has been amazing, but damn, where’s the reliable radio tech ?

2

I’ve never had an issue with this kit: https://tubeszb.com/

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The reason a lot of people prefer Z-Wave to Zigbee is because Z-Wave doesn’t share the same radio frequency band with as many commonly used services like Zigbee does. Zigbee, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth all do.

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I have 4 wifi APs using channels 1, 6 and 11. I also have assorted bluetooth devises (phones, earbuds, speakers, beacons, etc…).

I have zero issues with Zigbee. I do have a well meshed network though:

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Wifi and bluetooth performance is not noticeably degraded either.

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Hi!

Seach the forums, there are lots of issues with the 700 and 800 series zwave. especially the Aeotec Zwave 7 series you bought has issues.

try a 500 series (like the Aeotec one) and you’ll worrie free :slight_smile:
I’ve presonally migrated from the Aeotec 700 to the 500 makes all the difference in the world.

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What region are you in? Did you perhaps buy controllers that default to US region and not switch them to EU?

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Ah ok, well I hope support for the long range versions gets better, because that was my main reason to try out zwave. As it turns out the Aeotec was the only one I got working pretty easily. I guess things have improved.

I’m in latin america, which I would guess would follow US standards.

Decent earthing is an issue here, which I imagine doesn’t help any kind of radio performance.

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wow that does indeed look like a dense mesh! need more nodes! :slight_smile: